D.C. flight plan: Limbo for FAA

Congress was ready Tuesday to take its August recess without getting the deal done. No, you didn’t miss a last-minute wrinkle in the debt-ceiling saga. But Congress left some other pressing business unfinished.

Its failure to reauthorize funding for the Federal Aviation Administration has consequences for anyone who boards a plane. Some airlines, temporarily relieved of duty to remit FAA ticket taxes, simply raised base fares to taxes-included levels. Shameful!

There’s no immediate safety issue, since air-traffic controllers remain on the job. But there’s big South Jersey fallout. At the FAA’s William J. Hughes Technical Center in Egg Harbor Township, described Tuesday in a nationaljournal.com story as “the largest aviation-research facility in the world,” the “mess at FAA” has left 640 employees on indefinite furlough since July 22. About 1,000 tech center workers and 1,300 contract employees are still on the job, but a long stalemate threatens their work, too.

In this fragile economy, who needs hundreds more South Jersey families without work? Also, FAA construction projects around the nation are in limbo.

In the past four years, there were 20 temporary extensions of FAA funding authority; some in Congress are in no mood to grant a 21st.

Republicans mostly blame Democrats for refusing to accept supposedly “modest” budget reductions — but some GOPers are making a special point that one cut would impact a small airport in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s home state of Nevada. Democrats claim Republicans’ desire to install supposedly anti-union FAA policies is holding up funding renewal.

U.S. Rep. Frank LoBiondo, R-2nd Dist., a patron of the tech center in his district, said Tuesday in a press release that he’s been seeking a compromise, and that those dang House and Senate leaders are at fault.

LoBiondo is right that it’s irresponsible for Congress to shut down for a month without fixing this. But after the deficit debacle, shaming Congress, like shaming the airlines, is futile.

FAA employees and the public deserve better. You have to wonder if former U.S. Rep. William J. Hughes, the statesman-like Democrat for whom the tech center was named, would have solved this by now.